Something is afoot. Something is stirring and shifting. It shouldn’t be a surprise, yet somehow it is. Spiritual emergency, which is all about rebirth, is going through a rebirth of its own. A term first coined back in the 1980s, interest in the phenomenon had waned; awareness and understanding of this transpersonal approach to psychospiritual crisis had fallen away.Now, as we hurtle towards the 2012 Winter Solstice, people are waking up and realising that we need this understanding, this information, more than ever.What am I going by? What are the signs? First, there’s the recently launched work of The Wakeup: New Earth Alliance for Addiction Recovery. The team approaches addiction from the perspective of spiritual emergency, which makes so much sense. You can find out more about their wonderful work at http://www.the-wakeup.com/. You can join their Ning community at http://thewakeup.ning.com/Then there’s the initiative to launch a new Spiritual Crisis Network in Holland. I’ll be speaking at the conference to mark this exciting new development at the University of Leiden on 15 & 16 September. www.parapsy.nl May there be many more such national networks to join the existing ones!

Emma Bragdon, who wrote a classic spiritual emergency text back in the 1980s, has two new books out: Resources for Extraordinary Healing: Schizophrenia, Bipolar and Other Serious Mental Illnesses (Lightening Up Press) and Spiritism and Mental Health: Practices from Spiritist Centers and Spiritist Psychiatric Hospitals (Singing Dragon, a Jessica Kingsley Publishers imprint). Her work today is still very much about helping to shift to the new paradigm of mental health.To cap it all, George Noory on the American radio show Coast to Coast discussed this very subject recently with his guests Dr Seth Farber, dissident psychologist and co-founder of the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry and Paul Levy. Farber’s point is that many forms of ‘mental illness’ are actually spiritual and supernatural experiences. Check out Paul Levy’s website: http://www.awakeninthedream.com/wordpress/

Finally, the Beyond Meds blog is covering many angles of spiritual emergency these days: http://beyondmeds.com/All I can say about these initiatives is ‘thank goodness’! Thank you to all these dedicated people for what they are bringing to the collective consciousness right now. When I heard recently of yet another tragedy caused by mental health staff dismissing the spiritual dimension, I was reminded of how desperately needed this awareness and understanding is. But then I never really forget.

A big thank you to all of you for your great questions on yesterday’s live webinar with author Steve Taylor and myself!

I particularly appreciated Kimberley May Jones’ question about the global awakening of consciousness, this huge evolutionary shift we are currently experiencing. In his response Steve talked about how at every stage of evolution the next step, the next leap is latent in the one before. A similar principle applies, he said, in thetiny fertilised egg in the womb – it holds the latent potential of a grown, mature adult.

His words reminded me of Barbara Marx Hubbard’s take, which is exactly the same. She also says that at no point in time has nature evolved without crisis. One example she gives is of single-celled life that appeared in the sea 3.5 billion years ago. It hit a growth point and began overpopulating, polluting and stagnating (pretty much like us now!). This crisis point became the driver for evolution: oxygen appeared.I talk about this in my article ‘Trusting Crisis’ published in the next issue of Caduceus. As I said in the webinar, in response to Kimberley’s question, crisis is the driver of that evolution, of that awakening. This is true at the individual level and at the global.We ended the webinar on what felt like a really positive and uplifting note; that in time the awakened state will become the norm. This is what we’re evolving towards. As Richard Bucke wrote in 1901:‘...our descendents will sooner or later reach, as a race, the condition of cosmic consciousness...’Cosmic consciousness here we come!